The background description provided here is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVS) may be used to transport cargo or other payloads from one location to another. For example, delivery of packages by UAV or drone aircraft is one application. Some known methods of navigating a UAV to a particular destination may use Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) information such as Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) coordinates. However, GPS coordinates are typically not accurate enough to guide an aircraft to a particular point to interact with a payload or cargo. For example, GPS may have an accuracy of approximately 16 feet under typical operating conditions. Therefore, using GPS alone may land an aircraft up to 16 feet away from a payload to be picked up, or may result in dropping off a piece of cargo up to 16 feet away from its intended target.
Due to this uncertainty in location information, loading and unloading small autonomous aircraft may need to be done manually. That is, the aircraft may land at an approximate location and then the cargo is manually loaded or unloaded by hand. Some autonomous systems for loading and unloading aircraft are known but rely on extensive ground support infrastructure and may require power sources to power active components on the ground. These approaches may be acceptable for scenarios involving transporting cargo from one known location to another known location but do not adapt to scenarios where destinations are unknown ahead of time and lack ground support infrastructure.